Build and Engage Community

Making the right relationships, and nurturing and keeping them is one of the biggest challenges for digital marketers today. People come to your website for content, but they stay for community making communities the epicenter of true customer engagement. To build an engaged community around your brand, you need a balance of company and user-generated content.

When done correctly, online communities lead to increased brand loyalty, word-of-mouth advertising, and customer recommendations and endorsements. They also give you an opportunity to develop long-term relationships with your customers—the kind of relationships that provide invaluable insights that lead to product innovation, process improvements, and increased customer satisfaction.

So how do you unlock the power of community and enable true engagement? CommonSpot has a host of features to help you build community, engage users authentically, and make them your greatest brand advocates.

Give site visitors a glimpse of what's happening in the coming days, weeks, or months using the open source PaperThin Calendar app. Enable staff and your community to easily contribute event data such as meetings and other social events via a simple forms interface.

Use the PaperThin Forum to enable authenticated community members whether internal or external to post comments, follow discussion threads, and receive instant notifications when new comments are added.

Does your site have a members only section that requires authenticated access? Use CommonSpot to enroll new members to your community site easily and securely and show members only the content they are authorized to view.

Showcase human assets (such as faculty, staff, students, and physicians) and bring a voice of authenticity to your site using the PaperThin profile app. The profile app leverages existing ERP data such as name and title enabling authenticated users to easily create profile pages, upload photos, edit bios, and manage personal information through a simple forms interface.

Combine posts from chosen social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, or WordPress) and display them in a single data stream on your website to better engage website visitors with real-time content, promotions, and peer conversations.

Give your site the voice of authenticity by attracting and automatically publishing visitor-generated content. A simple forms-based interface makes it easy to add blog posts, comments, reviews, testimonials, and more from members of your community.

As with all things on the Internet today, sharing is essential. Whether between students and friends, or faculty and staff, the new AU website utilizes CommonSpot to foster the AU community which is essential to bringing the entire campus together.